In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture. “America,” Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.” As tempers rose, one U.S. official reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.

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